The morning light was soft, the kind that usually made the penthouse glow golden, like the universe wanted to be kind to me for once. The air smelled faintly of coffee and cedar wood, the signature Adrian Castellane scent that clung to everything in his world. Four days had passed since the gala. Four days since the kiss that burned my soul. Four days since we crossed the line in his bedroom — our skin pressed together, our bodies finally giving into the fire we’d been dancing around.
And yet, here I was, sitting at his kitchen counter, my stomach in knots, watching him read through his emails like I didn’t even exist.
The silence stretched. Not the comforting kind, but the brittle kind that could shatter with a single wrong word. His dog, Zeus, lay sprawled lazily by the balcony doors,
